1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a wireless communication system, and more particularly, to a wireless communication system and a related method for adjusting a used depth of a buffer unit in the wireless communication system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Generally speaking, before playing multimedia packets, such as a video stream or an audio stream transmitted on a network, a section of data is pre-downloaded to the buffer to be buffered. As the network is interfered to cause the actual link speed be smaller than the playing speed of the multimedia packets, the player will access the section of data stored in the buffer to avoid interruption or interference upon the playback of the multimedia packets. The size of the section of data is usually decided based on the delay allowed by the multimedia player. However, there maybe a large change in the wireless network during transmissions, such as a higher transmission speed within a short distance, a lower transmission speed within a long distance, a smoother transmission without interferences, or a poor transmission with interferences. For this reason, if the buffer with a fixed size is adopted in the wireless communication system, the multimedia packets, such as the video stream or the audio stream, cannot be played smoothly or in real time. Most of the conventional mechanisms for adjusting the size of the buffer usually adopt statistics upon the delay conditions of the past received packets to estimate the delay conditions of the future packets, and accordingly adjust the size of the buffer (i.e., the delay time of playing the packets). But this kind of method has a slow response to the wireless communication system with instantaneous interferences.
Hence, how to quickly respond to changes in the wireless network environment in order to adjust the buffer size has become an important topic of the field.